Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker

“We are still monitoring!”
Who were the idiots now?
Sometime later, my mom received a letter from General Telephone,
followed by an in-person visit from Don Moody, the head of Security for
the company, who warned her that if I didn’t stop what I was doing, GTE
would terminate our telephone service for fraud and abuse. Mom was
shocked and upset by the idea of losing our phone service. And Moody
wasn’t kidding. When I continued my phreaking, GTE did terminate our
service. I told my mom not to worry, I had an idea.
The phone company associated each phone line with a specific address.
Our terminated phone was assigned to Unit 13. My solution was pretty low-
tech: I went down to the hardware store and sorted through the collection of
letters and numbers that you tack up on your front door. When I got back to
the condo, I took down the “13” and nailed up “12B” in its place.
Then I called GTE and asked for the department that handled
provisioning. I explained that a new unit, 12B, was being added to the
condominium complex and asked them to adjust their records accordingly.
They said it would take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to update the
system.
I waited.
When I called back, I said I was the new tenant in 12B and would like to
order phone service. The woman at the phone company asked what name
I’d like the number listed under.
“Jim Bond,” I said. “Uh, no… why not make that my legal name?
James.”
“James Bond,” she repeated, making nothing of it—even when I paid an
extra fee to choose my own number: 895-5… 
007
.
After the phone was installed, I took down the “12B” outside our door
and replaced it with “13” again. It was several weeks before somebody at

---

GTE caught on and shut the service down.
Years later I would learn that this was when GTE started a file on me. I
was seventeen years old.
About the same time, I got to know a man named Dave Kompel, who was
probably in his midtwenties but had not outgrown teenage acne that was so
bad it disfigured his appearance. In charge of maintaining the Los Angeles
Unified School District’s PDP-11/70 minicomputer running the RSTS/E
operating system, he—along with a number of his friends—possessed
computer knowledge I highly prized. Eager to be admitted into their circle
so they would share information with me, I made my case to Dave and one
of his friends, Neal Goldsmith. Neal was an extremely obese guy with short
hair who appeared to be coddled by his wealthy parents. His life seemed to
be focused only on food and computers.
Neal told me they’d agreed to allow me into their circle, but I had to prove
myself first. They wanted access to a computer system called “the Ark,”
which was the system at Digital Equipment used by the development group
for RSTS/E. He told me, “If you can hack into the Ark, we’ll figure you’re
good enough for us to share information with.” And to get me started, Neal
already had a dial-up number that he had been given by a friend who
worked on the RSTS/E Development Team.
He gave me that challenge because he knew there was no way in the
world I’d be able to do it.
Maybe it really was impossible, but I sure was going to try.
The modem number brought up a logon banner on the Ark, but of course
you had to enter a valid account number and password. How could I get
those credentials?
I had a plan I thought might work, but to get started I would need to
know the name of a system administrator—not someone in the development
group itself but one of the people who managed the internal computer
systems at Digital. I called the switchboard for the facility in Merrimack,
New Hampshire, where the Ark was located, and asked to be connected to
the computer room.
“Which one?” the switchboard lady asked.

---

Oops. I hadn’t ever thought to research which lab the Ark was in. I said,
“For RSTS/E development.”
“Oh, you mean the raised-floor lab. I’ll connect you.” (Large computer
systems were often mounted on raised floors so all the heavy-duty cabling
could be run underneath.)
A lady came on the line. I was taking a gamble, but they wouldn’t be
able to trace the call, so even if they got suspicious, I had little to lose.
“Is the PDP-11/70 for the Ark located in this lab?” I asked, giving the
name of the most powerful DEC minicomputer of the time, which I figured
the development group would have to be using.
She assured me it was.
“This is Anton Chernoff,” I brazenly claimed. Chernoff was one of the
key developers on the RSTS/E Development Team, so I was taking a big
risk that she wouldn’t be familiar with his voice. “I’m having trouble
logging in to one of my accounts on the Ark.”
“You’ll have to contact Jerry Covert.”
I asked for his extension; she didn’t hesitate to give it to me, and when I
reached him, I said, “Hey, Jerry, this is Anton,” figuring that even if he
didn’t know Chernoff personally, he was almost certain to know the name.
“Hey, how’re you doing?” he answered jovially, obviously not familiar
enough with Chernoff in person to know that I didn’t sound like him.
“Okay,” I said, “but did you guys delete one of my accounts? I created
an account for testing some code last week, and now I can’t log in.” He
asked what the account log-in was.
I knew from experience that under RSTS/E, account numbers were a
combination of the project number and the programmer number, such as
1,119—each number running up to 254. Privileged accounts always had the
project number of 1. And I had discovered that the RSTS/E Development
Team used programmer numbers starting at 200.
I told Jerry that my test account was “1,119,” crossing my fingers that it
wasn’t assigned to anyone.
It was a lucky guess. He checked and told me there wasn’t any 1,119
account. “Damn,” I answered. “Somebody must have removed it. Can you
re-create it for me?”
What Chernoff wanted, Chernoff got. “No problem,” Jerry said. “What
password do you want?”

---

I spotted a jar of strawberry jelly in the kitchen cabinet across from me. I
told him, “Make it ‘jelly.’ ”
In hardly more than a blink, he said, “Okay, all done.”
I was 
stoked
, the adrenaline running high. I could hardly believe it
could’ve been so easy. But would it really work?
From my computer, I called the dial-in number my would-be mentor
Neal had given me. The call connected and this text appeared:
RSTS V7.0-07 * The Ark * Job 25 KB42 05-Jul-80 11:17 AM
# 1,119
Password:
Dialup password:
Damn, damn, damn. I dialed Jerry Covert back, again as Chernoff. “Hey,
I’m dialing in from home, and it’s asking for a dial-up password.”
“You didn’t get it in your email? It’s ‘buffoon.’ ”
I tried again and